Preview: Auckland Chamber Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

Chris Gendall, who provides the evening with its title, Wax Lyrical, will top next Sunday's bill. Photo / Supplied

What: Auckland Chamber Orchestra, Wax Lyrical.
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday July 19, at 5pm.

The New Zealand composing community has much to be grateful for to Peter Scholes and his Auckland Chamber Orchestra. For the past few years, the orchestra's Composer Portraits concerts have celebrated the likes of Ross Harris, John Psathas, John Rimmer, Gillian Whitehead and Gareth Farr. And now the ACO explores new directions with Wax Lyrical, a collection of six Auckland premieres by a younger generation of composers.

For Scholes, tackling the contemporary "is the most relevant thing to do" and, in times when "authenticity" is a buzz-word, "the ultimate authenticity is to perform in the company of the composer. They're there and can tell you if they're happy with what you're doing."

"The big priority is the live performance," Scholes affirms. "From both the performers' and composers' point of view, it's important to know that your music is going out to an audience."

The unpredictable audience component has figured very much in Scholes' life over his last 10 years at the helm of the ACO. "Audiences are made up of many niches of musical taste. If you want to hear everything, come to all our concerts, but if you want contemporary, next Sunday is where it's at."

Topping the bill is Chris Gendall who provides the evening with its title in Wax Lyrical, a score which carried off the SOUNZ Contemporary Award at last year's Silver Scrolls. Playing devil's advocate, I ask whether Gendall's piece might be everyone's idea of lyrical. "No," Scholes replies. "It's about gesture. It builds and shapes and is hugely well-crafted and very exciting, without getting into the John Psathas-type groove that Chris has used in the past."

Scholes' orchestra is familiar with the work of Auckland composer Anthony Young, having launched his Three Songs on Poems of Jean Toomer in 2006. Firmament, Young's offering next Sunday, is "very intricate ... I like its melodic side and it's got a minimalist approach which I enjoy. I like time being stretched out and things taking a while to evolve."

Harmony is at the core of Samuel Holloway's Strange Loops, an obsessive pondering on a virtually stationary chord. "There's a lot notated with enormous complexity but there's incredible simplicity," is Scholes' assessment. "I love that paradox."

Dylan Lardelli's Four Fragments is "getting lots of questions from the players. It is very subtle, with lots of breaths, clicks and pops as Dylan explores that territory where music meets noise. Dylan is probably the most abstract of all the composers. But should that be a problem? We've moved on from that being an issue in the visual arts."

For this concert, Scholes hands over the baton to James Gardner, another Auckland composer and founder of that unflinchingly up-to-date ensemble, 175 East. Instead, Scholes will pick up his clarinet and play in Robin Toan's Barcelona Postcards and Karlo Margetic's Svitac, a piece originally written for clarinet accompanied by upright piano with the practice pedal held down.

"Karlo has arranged it for clarinet with strings, piano and harp," Scholes explains. "A lot of it is very very soft and the clarinet is set in unusually long phrases with microtone trills. The title translates as 'Glowworm'."

The big question remains: what will happen to these scores after Sunday's concert? "That's the problem," Scholes agrees. "As a composer you often only get one go."

Having worked with a film director who told him to cull down his score so it did nothing but make a statement, Scholes feels composers need to make their own decisions.

"It's a matter of whether you want to grab the listeners right away, or develop an audience which might appreciate your music the more time they put into it. If you write music which reveals its secrets immediately maybe people won't want to hear it again anyway."